


The Sweetest Roses

by Giglet



Category: The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-19
Updated: 2008-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:32:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1639118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Giglet/pseuds/Giglet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The unicorn has returned to her wood, Lir is learning to rule, and Molly and Schmendrick may still be prickly but their brambles are sporting blossoms.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sweetest Roses

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the incomparable Aral, Luna, Terri, Briar_pipe, Kaifu, and Petronelle for beta reading.  
> Written for pekori

 

 

The spring sun warmed the morning, and Molly took the long way home from the market. They'd settled down, but she hadn't quite lost the habit of wandering. 

She didn't go near the palace -- she left court life to Schmendrick, and he was welcome to it. Instead she meandered down through the poorer end of town, noticing the living things that nobody else paid attention to: the waifs and the stray dogs and the pigeons. At the gates, she stopped to gossip with the oxen by the water trough, and then walked along the top of a stone wall edging a pasture, swinging the fraying basket on her arm. She could fix the basket, she supposed. Or she could ask Schmendrick to fix it, but he was still largely useless at anything that didn't involve magic. Magic had no business with her market basket, and they both knew it.

One reason they'd stopped here last fall was that the king of this tiny kingdom also knew what a magician was for, and (more importantly) what magic was not for. The courtiers weren't as wise. Their cottage, at least, was perfectly positioned: far enough that courtiers didn't follow him home for love philters (often) but near enough to the side door of the King's palace to let Schmendrick come and go. More importantly, the little house on the outskirts of town was close enough to go to market while still offering Molly space for a garden. In the last six months, they'd made it home.

Molly took the path through the pastures that gave her a view of trees in the distance. The wood was another, more important reason they'd chosen the cottage. It was within sight of a unicorn's wood, but far enough away that they never expected to catch a glimpse of the unicorn. (Not their unicorn. Another one. Molly couldn't say how she knew it wasn't her own unicorn, but she did. They both knew.) It was enough to know that the unicorn was there, somewhere in the distant trees.

Today the maples showed the red fuzz of buds just beginning to break. She could almost feel the sap rising through her: her feet were positively merry as she turned in through the gate, letting the blanket of scents from the garden surround her, and the apple-blossom ambrosia of their tiny orchard.

It had been half a year, but they didn't count their days from settling in this town. Really, it had been a full year. An entire year since the unicorns returned to the world, since their unicorn regained her true shape and lost her beloved and returned both sadder and wiser to the perfect loneliness of her wood. A year since King Haggard fell, since the Red Bull departed and spring returned to his land.

* * *

It had been a year since Good King Lir (as he was known) had taken up the burden of the crown. He'd wandered his kingdom for months, staying with shepherd and sheriff, bunking with cottager and count, and slowly gathering a retinue of brave young men and questing women, wise advisors and travelling minstrels, as well as venturesome lads and lasses who followed him just to see what would happen next. 

When he arrived at the home of the stooped, heirless Duke of the Eastern Marches, his host had sighed contentedly at the brave and beautiful band. After dinner, he handed his circlet of office to Lir and gave the king his castle, saying he'd done his duty during the hard times of Haggard's reign, and he'd earned his retirement. He intended to enjoy it with a widowed goodwife in the next kingdom over. She had always welcomed the man but told him years ago that she had no use for a duke, certainly not enough to pack up her loom and move away from her grandchildren to live in an echoing drafty old castle in a blighted land. Now that the future was in capable and caring hands, he would go to her, he said. His pipe, his favorite slippers, and a wedding ring would fit into his saddlebags easily enough, but the ducal crown was too heavy to take with him. 

The last Lir saw of him, the ex-duke was on an old swaybacked mare, ambling away and singing a song about how the sweetest roses bloom in the autumn.

* * *

It had been a year, Schmendrick realized, since he had found Molly. Amid those great events, those greater miracles, their hearts met as quietly as an afterthought. One hand twined into another hand, a smile shared, and neither had had to say a thing. They'd slipped together, like sugar and cocoa in a mug -- or more appropriately, like garlic and onion in a frying pan. The change hadn't looked like much from the outside. The change was beyond words, like the unicorn, like everything important.

They still quarrelled. All the time, more or less. Molly would start the day sharply, rolling out of bed with a stretch and a grumble before going to stir up the fire. By lunch time, Schmendrick would be frustrated at something or other, and say terrible things utterly by inattention -- and then, once his attention had been drawn to his behavior, he'd make everything worse by saying terrible things intentionally. Usually to Molly.

She kicked him out at least once a week. He'd stride away or stump off, depending on whether he felt he'd won the argument or not, to the inn. Then he'd go home, and what with one thing and another and a mattress that sagged in the middle, they'd be back in each other's good graces by the middle of the night. Only to start over again the next morning.

"Molly, the darling girl," Schmendrick explained to the bartender in the inn, was the best possible target for his words, because she fought back. "Words as sharp as a January freeze," he claimed. "A January freeze on the horns of a new moon."

People who cherished their peace and quiet avoided Molly and Schmendrick's house.

It could have been terrible, their house, with all that quarrelling, but it wasn't. It didn't even require the ability to see a unicorn to show that behind every word and every gesture there was love, even if it was the prickly sort of love indulged in by porcupines or humans who have had more than their fair share of years and disappointments.

Almost everyone in the town could hear it, which was one reason they settled here instead of, say, Hagsgate. (Although the existence of Hagsgate comforted Schmendrick, in a way. The people there got their just desserts: kindness was rewarded and miserliness was punished. Unlike in the rest of the world.) Out of the entire town, only the old deaf men who sat by the fountain in the summer and in the inn's common room in the inclement weather couldn't hear their arguments. But they watched and laughed just the same. Nobody quite understood Molly Grue or Schmendrick except each other, a little. Sometimes. But that was enough.

A neighbor girl, who was just budding into questions about the potential consolations of matrimony, once asked them, "Have you been married long, then?"

And Molly said, "Yes, it seems like forever," at the same time that Schmendrick said, "No, barely any time at all." And then they laughed at each other, because both answers were true. Only a year had passed since their unicorn had left them, and it was both unbearably long and just yesterday. That night they'd come together in the generous darkness because they were still so new, and still depending on the other to make their losses bearable.

* * *

Sometimes Schmendrick could still see the unicorn when he looked at Molly Grue. Or rather, not the unicorn herself, but the signs of her passing. It was as far as possible from the footprints in the mud that the Red Bull left, or the ravages of time and fear. It was more like grace, freely given and received. It was in the lines crinkling at the corner of Molly's eyes when she heard a child laughing with delight. Or the way the moonlight shone in her hair when she let it down, coming to bed in the evenings. He saw the moonlight gleam there, even on nights of a new moon.

He could tell that she was one woman in a million, this woman who let him share her bed. And over the long years of his wretched immortality, he'd seen thousands, maybe tens of thousands of women, and not one could match Molly Grue for faith and hope. Not even the princesses who walked as lightly as air, nor the mage-women who sang spells as sweetly as mockingbirds, could match Molly for beauty, not of her face but the beauty that lived deep, deep in her eyes.

This was a woman who had kept hope alive through years of no unicorns, who had banked the ember of her dreams. When every other adult had seen only a white mare with strangely colored eyes, Molly knew enough to recognize a unicorn when she saw it. She hadn't hesitated to leave home and wander barefoot for the unicorn's company, and called it a privilege.

Sometimes, now, Molly lay next to Schmendrick and touched him, so gently, fingers to his lips or caressing his bony spine. She let her hands say the words her lips wouldn't form: "husband" and "lover" and "I accept you." And -- especially sweet after year on year of his failure as a magician and a man -- her hands spelled words on his skin that read something like "hero" and "protector" and "beloved." Then he remembered: not only was she the one woman in a million who had travelled with a unicorn, she was something even rarer. Molly Grue had been the first to teach the unicorn about time, and about the sweetness of mortality.

He adored her. (Not that his lips were any better at forming sweet words -- at least, not when he meant them.)

And, with that peculiar blindness that he shared with many men, it never occurred to Schmendrick to wonder whether she could trace the tracks of the unicorn across his face or hear her in his voice, or see the unicorn's grace in the gestures of his hands. He never wondered. And Molly, who had always watched for signs of a unicorn, saw the traces on him and loved him a little more each time she saw them. But she never told him that he was that rarest of all wonders: a man -- just a foolish, heart-wounded man -- who had travelled with a unicorn and been healed. 

 


End file.
